Having never bothered with upgrading my Living Ship since it never had any when introduced, (I had my eyes on other things when they were added with the endurance update), I found myself wondering how it all works with the introduction of The Wraith reward ship from Expedition 17 - Titan.
I thought I’d share what I’ve learned about Psychonic Eggs, Spawning Sacs and characteristics in Evolving/Upgrading tech modules.
Before you can even begin to add new storage space and upgrades to your living ship, you will need Organic or Living frigates.
When these Frigates are sent along on fleet missions, they have a chance to bring back at least 1 Psychonic Egg per mission, with Spawning Sacs being extremely rare in comparison and never guaranteed.
Spawning Sacs are pretty straight forward, they allow you to add a tech or cargo slot, these can be used within your inventory, no need to visit a space station.
Psychonic eggs, once hatched, will produce an Upgrade Module for a living ships components, ranging from weapons, pulse drive, warp drive, lauch thrusters etc. These have unique names for their living ship counterparts but I’ll refer to them as so as it’s the most common known names.
For the weapons, you have a chance of gaining an S Class upgrade from the eggs, as well as A and B class.
For the pulse and warp drives, you will only find C class in the eggs (you can occasionally get b/a class for warp, but very rare)
For the shields you will find B class upgrades while you will only find C class for launch/pulse drive (both use same smbol of arrows)
Here is an image of results after hatching 60 or so psychonic eggs
In order to obtain S class upgrades for these components, you must first install them and then use nanites (ranging from 100-500+) to upgrade them up one class.
For certain components, the S class will max out at a set point, e.g S-class launch thrusters will always be 20% with auto re-fueling.
For others, each evolution stage seems randomized, in otherwords, a C-class that only does 2% damage could actually turn out to be a better S class than a C-Class that starts with 5% damage. The starting stats are no indication of how well it will evolve. Some can even lose a stat entirely going from B to A, only to retain it again when going to S class.
What I have noticed however, is the closer the module is to an S class when it begins its life, the better it will be as an S class.
This also means, for the modules than can hatch as S-class, you probably wont evolve an A-class to be as good as that. Since the Grafted eyes seems to be one of the only modules that hatches as an S Class, you won’t really experience this with the other module types.
So an A-class weapon upgrade can average 7-8% damage at S-class, but a B-class weapon upgrade averages 6-7% at S-class.
I took screens of about 50 upgrades before and after but a lot of those were the same result (in cases where the s-class will always be the same) or just evidence of the averages for damage output stated above. I won’t hurt your bandwidth by sharing all of them but below you will find some screenshots showing evidence of what I’ve discussed in my findings.
If theres anything I missed or you’ve found some interesting results yourself, feel free to share below and why not show off how you eeked out your Living Ships stats whether you’ve done it before or it’s your first time trying.
Much thanks to @sheralmyst for pointing out that you can evolve the lower tiered upgrades or I would never have even made it this far with testing any of this.
These seem to max out at 20% launch cost reduction, let me know if you’ve seen higher
shield always seems to max out at 30% at s class, have yet to see any higher…
Heat and Fire rate seem to cap out at 3% but again, if you’ve seen higher do share <3
